i have family therapy on wednesday i would rather sit at home listen to talk sport much as they are loathsome.
When i ask: what is the object of this? how do we conceptualise things, what are the systems we are using to push things forward in desired directions, is applying coercion and redirection necessary?

i get a blank.

It is all premised on the loving nuclear family unit. which is kind of besides the point.

Dan Langlois shared a link to the group: Kant in contemporary philosophy.
I think this conversation is great. Very good discussion. Kant does come up in here.
--Jordan Peterson, the public intellectual du jour. I admit that I see him as a good logical thinker (I think of him as Asperger's guy). And with him currently topping the nonfiction bestseller list, there is the urgent question whether he is someone to be worshipfully idolized and followed off the cliff, and there are people on both sides of that question. You may have been superfically misled about 'What are Jordan B Peterson's political views?', and 'what does Peterson actually believe?', because of course he has railed against Marxism, human rights organisations, HR departments and “an underground apparatus of radical left political motivations” etc. In terms of Youtube hits, his lectures and debates have been viewed almost 40m times, partially for this 'Marxists decided to infiltrate the education system' idea.
--There is also mister 'atheists often lose public debates with theists', William Lane Craig, who has a game of having 'prepared for the debate' by reading Alvin Plantinga, Rowe, Alston, Oppy, and also Aquinas, Augustine, Origen, Tertullian, and modern theologians like Hart. And, then, he goes up in debates against atheists who have read Wikipedia, and are expecting endless vacuous statements that it is true because it is true and every other illogical and nonsensical testament to "teh troof!"
--There is Rebecca Newberger Goldstein from Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein, America's brainiest couple. She has written ten books. is a MacArthur Fellow (a “genius grant”). She's into mounting a spirited defence of philosophy ('Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away'). There’s no lofty airs or scholarly posing, but a deft appreciation of Plato’s thinking, she is able to deliver an exhilarating exposition of ancient Greek and Platonic thought. Goldstein is married to Pinker!? They met because she was following a debate Pinker had been having with the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould and, Pinker had quoted her rare use of the past participle “stridden” to illustrate a grammatical point. She phoned him up.
This being youtube, you can glance at the comments on the youtube comments thread, and despair for civilization. Like any other youtube comment thread, but also, Jordan Peterson has the mien and intensity of that one cool high-school teacher, and has an army of internet trolls at his disposal.
Crazy Female Atheist CLASH With Jordan Peterson In Heated Debate

JP was in town recently on his little performance roadshow with Sam Harris. Organisers had trouble shifting tickets which were dramatically reduced in price in days prior. Nevertheless, the event was hailed by supporters as an unprecedented gathering of people open to "ideas" and whatnot. Harris might take comfort that the upcoming visit of the pope is also a bit slow at the box office. LRB review says the London O2 leg was also only a third full.

The ratio of men to women in the audience was no surprise, given Peterson’s defence of traditional gender roles and hierarchies. Missing from the crowd (and no doubt missing from most crowds that are so expensive to join) was much sign of the lost teenage boys whom Peterson is said to inspire, and – according to his defenders – lure away from the dangerous seductions of the ‘alt-right’. In contrast to his bestselling book, in person he offered little in the way of advice to the men who’d gathered to hear him – most were well past the age of needing to be told to stand up straight or to tidy their bedrooms.

If Peterson has a particular skill, beyond his undoubted eloquence, it’s the ability to move so seamlessly back and forth between scientific research and metaphysics, the primordial and the modern, that the audience scarcely notices the joins. It can be a mesmerising act, and is evidently a commercial success. Reflecting on the god-shaped hole in secular culture, he turned to the audience: ‘I suspect that many of you are here because you’d like to have the void addressed.’ To me this was a revelation. I thought we were here to watch a brain grenade being hurled at snowflakes and postmodernists. But I’m sure he was right. The market for metaphysical meaning is always going to be bigger than the one for intellectual aggro.

And a market logic this undoubtedly was. Probably sensing that this metropolitan crowd wouldn’t appreciate it, Murray left his personal bête noire, immigration, entirely alone (he obviously saves his best ‘free speech’ for the readers of the Spectator). The metaphysical ‘void’ does better at the box office than racial eugenics. But while the three men on stage were impeccably respectful of the feelings of their customers, the event’s organisers showed no such concern. A twenty-minute wait to get through the O2’s security on arrival, followed by a half-hour wait for a £5.50 bottle of Budweiser, could mean only one thing: minimal outlay on staff for maximum profit. Was all this just a scam, a quickfire means of monetising Peterson’s sudden celebrity? Quite how much does Peterson cost, that another two or three grand couldn’t be found to spend on bar staff? Without switching on the audience question-aggregating app, I didn’t have the chance to ask. Pangburn Philosophy wouldn’t be the first outfit to mine mass existential ennui for money, and they won’t be the last. Towards the end of that final 45 minutes, people began to traipse out. Peterson was still going as I exited the auditorium: ‘There’s an ancient idea that when you reach the void, and get to the bottom of the void, you reach a beast and that beast is your father …’ The DVD will be out soon.